The Hays Global Skills Index, released earlier this week, shows that gradual economic recovery is positively impacting the Irish labour market, with a slight loosening visible.

Ireland’s drop from 5.8 to 5.7 on the Hays Global Skills Index shows a lessening of pressure in the Irish jobs market – i.e., it’s slightly easier to get a job here now than it was a year ago.

The Index’s country profile for Ireland indicates that the Irish economy is on course to achieve the third fastest growth rate globally, just behind China and India.

Of Ireland’s recovery, Richard Eardley, MD of Hays Ireland, has said, “There are many promising signs that the Irish economy is starting to turn around. Growth rates are higher than in the rest of Europe and have far outpaced expectations.”

The improved economy has “triggered a significant change in employers’ attitudes towards hiring,” Eardley continued. “Companies in high-growth sectors such as construction and property, IT and engineering face increasing skills shortages, along with a necessity to review their attraction strategies to secure talent in a rapidly-evolving employment market.”

It’s not all good news

The talent gap persists in many sectors, and skills shortages may become increasingly apparent if the employment rate doesn’t rebound.

That talent gap is an issue in high-skilled industries globally. This has a negative effect on productivity, with many people being either over or under-qualified for their jobs.

Furthermore, talent shortages necessitating the working of longer hours does not result in more productivity, meaning an entire workforce is over-stretched with little benefit.

Commenting on the Hays Global Skills Index findings, Hay’s chief executive, Alastair Cox, called for businesses and governments to address the issue of talent gaps.

“Education and training schemes need to be better aligned and tailored to produce sufficient levels of the skilled resources businesses need,” said Cox. “However, this will take time to deliver results. In the meantime, regulatory and immigration reform is required as a short-term route to enable businesses to access world-class talent from outside their domestic markets. Otherwise, valuable jobs will continue to go unfilled.”

The Hays Global Skills Index analyses seven equally-weighted indicators, each of which assesses different dynamics of the labour market. The resulting score measures the pressures present in a country’s labour market.

The report looks at professional employment markets across 31 major global economies, including Ireland, the UK, the US, Australia and China.

Kirsty served as Silicon Republic’s Careers Editor from when she joined the company in 2015 up to August 2017. When she was younger, she had a dream where she started and won a fight with a T-Rex, so she’s pretty sure she kicked butt at this, too. Passions include eating all the cake, watching more TV than is healthy, and sassy comebacks. Her favourite thing on the internet is, and will likely remain, Pun Dog.

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